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Business professor speaks of living in Russia

Lauren Way


By Erin O'Connor

Staff Writer



WEST SPRINGFIELD - "A big part of being an entrepreneur is taking risks," Lauren Way, professor of business at Bay Path College and director of the Entrepreneurial and Cooperative Education programs, said at the April 19 meeting for the Women Business Owners Alliance of the Pioneer Valley (WBOA) where she was the keynote speaker.

Way shared her philosophies on entrepreneurship and stories of her struggles and successes as a young entrepreneur in the Soviet Union after the fall of communism.

In the early 1990's Way opened up one of the first International Commodities Businesses in Russia, she followed this by working in a Russian law firm and then went into higher education work.

"I went for opportunities and I followed passions," she said. "I learned to recognize what was good for me. Entrepreneurs have the talent of seeing opportunities that others do not see. I have viewed my own life as a series of opportunities. Opportunities that I recognized, I grabbed and hung onto for a wild ride."

According to Way, when she was a young student growing up in Vermont a teacher recommended she study foreign language. Way began studying Russian and shortly after was living in Russia.

"I was living abroad in 1990 where no Americans ever studied before," Way said. "There was a huge state of transition when I arrived in the Soviet Union but when I left it was just Russia."

The country was making the transition to free trade and Way said that she recognized increasing opportunities.

"After 70 years of communism and socialism, free enterprise turned the country on its head," she said. "Suddenly it was legal to buy something and sell it for more. People thought why not cheat, shoot people, have extortions. The pendulum swung from so far left to so far right and everything was so out of whack. I'm not sure if it is in balance now?"

With the help of a lawyer, Way said that she established a Russian Commodities Company.

"The word 'capitalism' was still a dirty word," she said. "There was a divide among the Russian population while the young people were jumping on the entrepreneurship bus the older generations were hanging onto the past."

Leaving the commodities business, Way said she next worked in a Russian law firm.

While living in Russia, Way encountered periods of a month or more during the winter in which the government would shut off hot water to conserve; she lived in an apartment building with one shower for 500 people, the clothes dryers had no heating elements and there was a severe toilet paper shortage.

"The first year that I was there they had a bad famine and I was issued ration tickets but there was no food to buy," she said. "There were stores with nothing to sell and I ate bread and potatoes for months at a time."

Way said that during her time living in Russia she learned a lot about line etiquette.

"If you see a line you jump into it," she said. "I stood in line once for three hours to buy eggs on a freezing cold day."

Way said citizens would walk around with plastic bags because if food was available it was not packaged individually and liquids needed individual bottling.

Two years later Way said she had her own apartment in Moscow complete with a maid, chef and chauffer.

"Russia in the early 1990's was like Chicago in the turn of the last century," she said. "The savvy Russian people went from rags to riches. The ethics of the business climate and the organized crime was the most organized thing. The mafia must be paid. There was no insurance. The mafia was your insurance."

Way said Russia was going through a time of hyperinflation. "I knew what my grandmother was talking about during the Depression when she said it took a wheelbarrow of money to buy a loaf of bread," Way said, "That is exactly what it was like."

Way said that from the time she came to Russia in the early 1990's until she left Russia a few years later the cost of ten eggs went from a few kopecks to 4,000 rubles. There are 100 kopecks in a ruble.

"Every challenge had a new lesson and a new opportunity," she said.

The Women Business Owners Alliance of the Pioneer Valley, Inc. (WBOA) was formed in 1982 to address the needs and support the interests of women business owners and allied professionals.